Abstract: Sexuality, as represented in African cinema from the 1970s to the present, no longer limits itself to its strictly biological function of reproduction. It inscribes itself in the more complex relationships of diverse social actors, and implicates itself in the intense activities of the socio-cultural space of African existence. More specifically, representations of sexuality in African cinema offer a broad platform of reflection upon notions of sexual pleasure, feminine desire, and the repartition of social roles. They permit, moreover, the emergence of new perspectives that go against the grain of both the dominant phallocratic domestic social order and Western doctrine imposed from the outside. The appropriation of cinematographic technology by African filmmakers who wish to produce an authentic vision from within validates both the filmmaker as a social actor and filmic discourse as a means of disalienation. One must recall that, for a long time, Western cinema has been a vector for all kinds of degrading prejudices vis-a-vis the sexuality of Africans by privileging a globalized vision of humanity that expulses the diversity of representations of social experiences in differing cultural contexts. This research sets out to examine the troubled evolution of representations of sexuality in West African cinema; further, it analyzes conceptual strategies and narratological processes by which African filmmakers distance themselves from caricatural and stereotypical visions of African social reality.